July 30, 2014

11:16 am

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I don’t think I have to raise the argument that social media has become one of the most prominent and indeed even identifying features of this generation. At a time when most conversations take place in the digital space, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become invaluable tools for coordinating discussions, sharing updates, and building relationships. For brands (business, personal, or otherwise), in particular, social media engagement has turned into a litmus test for future growth; if you fail to engage with your audience, then you ultimately set yourself on the path of irrelevancy and overall business failure.

In this age, much value is placed on “likes” and “retweets” – the more you have, the higher your potential for click-throughs and the greater your brand’s visibility. And, now, with TweetSquad, there’s a tool to help you vastly improve your Twitter click-through rate.

TweetSquad is a platform that allows your tweets to become more than merely a whisper amid the cacophony of noise that shows up on people’s Twitter feeds. It utilizes the relationship with a brand’s loyal followers and turns a Twitter “retweet” (or the act of doing so) into a kind of commodity that can be collected, saved up, and used for times when a brand really needs exposure. While TweetSquad is still in beta, it’s already produced some tremendous results for various companies that have tried it out. For example, EDM Sauce, an electro dance music lifestyle site, has improved their Twitter click-through rate by nearly 20 times:

“We love using TweetSquad to increase our reach on Twitter,” said EDM Sauce cofounder Elle Palmer. “I carefully measured all our Twitter engagement rates, and we saw an enormous increase with TweetSquad. On the first day we doubled our reach and on some tweets we’ve seen an 18x increase in click-through rates.”

It’s a pretty interesting concept, albeit difficult to understand at first – I myself had to take some time to really think about how it works. But once you get it, you’ll realize how much potential TweetSquad has for contributing to your brand’s goals.

The goal of TweetSquad is to make supporting brands via Twitter much easier, doing this by providing you with the capability to have dedicated supporters automatically retweet one of your tweets from their account. After signing up with TweetSquad, you’ll need to recruit people to your squad; basically, your squad will likely be comprised of your most loyal supporters on Twitter – from fans or consumers who like you to personal connections, like friends and family. In joining your TweetSquad, each of those users will agree to give you the ability to retweet one of your tweets to their followers one time per week. What this means is: if you have a really important message/announcement/link for which you want to maximize click-throughs on Twitter, you simply have to select that specific tweet and use however many of these retweet credits are available to you, and then that selected tweet gets automatically retweeted through the accounts of those in your TweetSquad.

To truly optimize the potential of TweetSquad, you have to recruit your followers to actually join your TweetSquad.

Your dashboard shows you 1) who exactly has joined your TweetSquad, 2) how many Twitter followers each user has, and 3) the number of available retweet credits you can use.

This shows your own recent tweets made from your own account. From these, you select which one you want to spend retweet credits on.

Once you’ve selected a tweet, you decide on how many retweet credits you want to use. For example, this tweet will get retweeted a total of 10 times automatically from the Twitter accounts of 10 of its 21 supporters.

The “recent retweets” page will show you the breakdown of how you spent each of your retweet credits, and from which accounts each specific tweet was retweeted.

“The core motivation – specifically when it comes to Twitter – is that it’s very ephemeral, and things go by quickly; it’s very difficult to catch every single tweet from the people you support,” said creator Michael Mayernick. “‘Is there anything on my feed that I should be retweeting to show support for what my friends are doing?’ I found that friends wanted me to help them do that, but it was very hard to manage all that. The current system is clunky, and people oftentimes end up having to email you to request a retweet.”

Mayernick (who’s also the cofounder of DC-/Palo Alto-based Spinnakr) built TweetSquad with the primary desire to support friends on Twitter. He was frustrated by the plain fact that he couldn’t read every one of his friends’ tweets (obviously, since your Twitter feed is an ongoing stream of consciousness), but more importantly, that there was no way for him to know whether he missed out on a really important update. Through TweetSquad, he can simply join a brand’s/a friend’s squad, and those important tweets can automatically be shared through his account. “It provides a way to be connected to the people around you that doesn’t require checking in with people and setting up custom Twitter lists,” he said.

TweetSquad is currently in beta, but users can sign up now for a special beta price of $9 per month. Check it out for yourself and try to grow your reach on Twitter.

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Ronald Barba was the previous managing editor of Tech.Co. His primary story interests include industry trends, consumer-facing apps/products, the startup lifestyle, business ethics, diversity in tech, and what-is-this-bullsh*t things.

Aside from writing about startups and entrepreneurship, Ronald is interested in ‘Doctor Who’, Murakami, ‘The Mindy Project’, and fried chicken. He is currently based in New York because he mistakenly studied philosophy in college and is now a “writer”. Tweet @RonaldPBarba.